Cinema Guild Acquires Restored Films Of French New Wave Master Luc Moullet ​on March 27, 2025 at 1:28 pm

EXCLUSIVE: Cinema Guild has acquired North American distribution rights on the restored films of French filmmaker Luc Moullet. 

Cinema Guild will mount a touring theatrical retrospective of Moullet’s work starting at Film at Lincoln Center in New York in August. Moullet, one of the last remaining members of the French New Wave, will attend the opening. 

The films included in the acquisition are Brigitte and Brigitte, The Smugglers, A Girl is a Gun, Anatomy of a Relationship, Origins of a Meal, The Comedy of Work, and Parpaillon. 

Often dubbed the “prince of shoestring cinema,” Moullet was one of the later filmmakers associated with the pioneering generation of French New Wave artists. 

At the age of 18, Moullet joined the ranks of Cahiers du Cinéma, where he was the first to champion Hollywood B-directors like Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer. Following the footsteps of other Cahiers alums like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Moullet became a filmmaker himself, creating a diverse body of work often characterized by its scrappiness, eclecticism, irreverence, and rejection of mainstream techniques. Jean-Marie Straub once described him as the “only heir to Luis Buñuel and Jacques Tati.”

In addition to his prolific output as a writer and director, Moullet also produced films by other subversive filmmakers like Marguerite Duras and Jean Eustache. 

The deal was negotiated by Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild with Gaël Teicher of La Traverse.

The restored films of Moullet are the latest works by modern masters to be picked up by Cinema Guild for North American distribution. The company recently mounted retrospectives of the pioneering Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro and Japanese director Shinji Somai. The company’s upcoming releases include Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream and What Does That Nature Say to You and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.